entered on the second stage in its history as a British possession.
It was divided into an English province and a French province, in
order as far as possible to prevent friction between two races not
yet accustomed to each other. For the English province English
land tenure was made the law of the land, in the French province
it was only made optional. Taxation of members of one religion for
the upkeep of another found no place in the Act, nor did taxation
of a colony by the mother country for the purposes of Imperial
revenue. The popular representatives were in the main given control
of the moneys raised from taxes: and no doubt was left as to who
had the keeping of the people’s purse.[204] On the other hand
the Executive power was left with the Crown, and the waste lands
provided possibilities of a revenue by which the government might
be supported apart from the taxes, and by which an Established
Church might be maintained apart from the tithes. The Imperial
Parliament too retained the power of regulating commerce, while
making no money out of the colony by any commercial regulations.
It was in short a prudent and tolerant half-way Act, wise and
practical in view of the times and the local conditions, and it
was evidence that England and Englishmen had learnt good and not
evil from the War of American Independence. A study of Canadian
history, with special reference to the Quebec Act of 1774 and the
Canada Act of 1791, and the results which flowed from them, leads
to the conclusion that in either case the British Government of
the day tried most honestly and most anxiously to deal with a very
complicated problem on its merits; that every effort was made
by the ministers of the Crown to mete out fair and considerate
treatment to the majority of the resident population in Canada; and
that those who framed and carried the laws guided themselves by
living facts rather than by _a priori_ reasoning. But it is also
impossible to resist the conclusion that at almost any time from
1783 onwards, until the Canadian Dominion came into being, there
was little to choose between the arguments for retaining a single
province, and those for constituting two provinces. In any case it
was inevitable that the provisions of the Act of 1791 should give
rise to new complications of various kinds; and apart from specific
questions, constitutional and otherwise, there were two very
practical difficulties which necessarily arose from the division of
the province of Quebec. The first was an Executive difficulty, of
which more will be said presently. From the date of the Act there
was increasingly divided authority in the Canadas. The second was a
financial difficulty arising from geographical conditions. One of
the two provinces had the keeping of the other, so far as regarded
access from and to the sea.
[Sidenote: Financial difficulties between the two provinces.]
As the line of division was drawn, Upper Canada, like the Transvaal
at the present day, was compelled to import all sea-borne articles
through territory under the administration of another government,
either through Lower Canada or through the United States. The
St. Lawrence being the high road of import and export, Lower
Canada commanded the trade of Upper Canada. Therefore, in order
to collect a customs revenue, it was necessary for the Upper
Province either to establish customs houses on the frontier of
Lower Canada--a measure which would probably have been ineffective
and would certainly have involved much inconvenience and expense,
or to come to some arrangement whereby a certain proportion of
the duties levied at Quebec, which was the port of entry of Lower
Canada, would be handed over to the administration of the Upper
Province. The latter course was taken, and in 1795, a provisional
arrangement was made, by which the proportion was fixed for the
time being at one-eighth. The record of what followed is a record
of perpetual friction, of commissions and temporary arrangements
confirmed by provincial Acts. It was suggested that the boundaries
of the provinces should be altered, and that Montreal should be
included in and be made the port of entry of Upper Canada, but
the suggestion was never carried into effect. As the population
of Upper Canada grew, the discontent increased. In 1818 one-fifth
of the duties was temporarily assigned to Upper Canada. Then a
complete deadlock ensued, which ended with the Imperial Canada
Trade Act of 1822. By arbitration under the terms of that Act the
proportion which Upper Canada was to receive was in 1824 raised to
one-fourth; and when Lord Durham reported, it was about two-fifths.
In his report Lord Durham referred to the matter as ‘a source of
great and increasing disputes’, which only came to an end when the
two provinces were once more united under the Imperial Act of 1840.
[Sidenote: The position in Canada when the new Act came into force.]
The Canada Act took effect on the 26th of December, 1791. Dorchester
was then in England, and Sir Alured Clarke, Lieutenant-Governor of
the province of Quebec under the old system and Commander of the
Forces in British North America, was acting for him. Under the new
Act Clarke was appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Lower Canada, while
the Lieutenant-Governorship of Upper Canada was conferred upon
Colonel Simcoe, both officers being subordinate to Dorchester as
Governor-in-Chief. Dorchester had left Canada on the 18th of August,
1791, and did not return till the 24th of September, 1793. His
prolonged absence was unfortunate in more ways than one. Technical
difficulties arose owing to the absence of the Governor-in-Chief,
for, as soon as the new Act came into force, Clarke’s authority was
confined by his commission to Lower Canada. The practical effect too
was that Simcoe started on his new charge with a free hand and found
it irksome, when Dorchester returned, to take a second place. Added
to this were the complications caused by the French declaration of
war against Great Britain in February, 1793, the hostilities between
the United States and the Indian tribes on the border land of
Canada, and the persistent and increasing bitterness in the United
States against Great Britain, caused partly by sympathy with the
French Revolution and the intrigues of French agents, and partly by
the British retention of the frontier forts and supposed British
sympathy with the Indians.
However, the political arrangements in Canada were carried into
effect without any appreciable friction. Clarke, a man of judgement
and discretion, did not hurry matters in Lower Canada. He divided
the province into electoral districts, and summoned the Legislature
for its first session at Quebec on the 17th of December, 1792,
when the Act had been in force for nearly a year. The session then
lasted into May. Simcoe arrived at Quebec on the 11th of November,
1791; but, as no Executive Council had yet been constituted for
Upper Canada, he could not be sworn in as Lieutenant-Governor
and take up his duties until the following midsummer, Upper
Canada being in the meantime left without any governor or
lieutenant-governor. In July, 1792, he issued a proclamation at
Kingston, dividing Upper Canada into districts, and on the 17th of
September the new Legislature met for the first time at Newark, on
the Canadian side of the Niagara river, near where that river flows
into Lake Ontario. The Lieutenant-Governor fixed his head quarters
at ‘Navy Hall’, a building constructed in the late war for the use
of the officers of the naval department on Lake Ontario. It stood
by the water’s edge, nearly a mile higher up the river than Newark;
and on the bank above, in the war of 1812, covering the buildings
below, stood the historic Fort George. The session was a short
one, closing on the 15th of October, but important work was done.
English law and procedure, and trial by jury, were established,
while proposals for taxation and the state of the marriage law gave
a field for difference of opinion and debate. When the session was
over, Simcoe reported that he found the members of the Assembly
‘active and zealous for particular measures, which were soon shown
to be improper or futile’, and the Council ‘cautious and moderate,
a valuable check upon precipitate measures’.[205]
[Sidenote: Simcoe.]
John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada,
was the son of a naval officer who died when serving under Admiral
Saunders in the fleet which helped to take Quebec. The son, who
derived his second name from another sailor, his godfather Admiral
Graves, was born in 1752. He was born in Northumberland, but after
his father’s death, his mother made her home in Devonshire. He was
educated at Exeter Grammar School, at Eton, and at Merton College,
Oxford, and he joined the army in 1771, when he was nineteen years
old. He served with much distinction in the War of Independence, in
which he commanded a Loyalist Corps, known as the Queen’s Rangers.
When the war ended, he held the rank of lieutenant-colonel.
After his return to England in bad health he spent some years at
his family home in Devonshire, he married, and in 1790 became a
member of Parliament, sitting for the borough of St. Mawes in
Cornwall. His Parliamentary career was very short, for in 1791,
before he was yet forty years of age, Pitt appointed him to be
Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada. He left Canada in 1796, and
soon after he reached England he was sent out as Governor to St.
Domingo. After a few months in the island, the state of his health
compelled him to come home. He became a lieutenant-general, and was
appointed to be Commander-in-Chief in India in succession to Lord
Lake, but he never took up the appointment. Prior to going out he
was sent to Lisbon in 1806 on a special mission, was taken ill, and
brought home to die. He died at Exeter in October, 1806. There is a
monument to him by Flaxman in Exeter Cathedral[206], and in Canada
his name is borne by Lake Simcoe.
He was not only a good soldier, but a capable, vigorous,
public-spirited man, well suited in many ways to be the pioneer
governor of a new province. He was strong on questions of military
defence and a great road maker. He made Yonge Street, the road from
Toronto north to Lake Simcoe, called after Sir George Yonge then
Secretary of State for War and afterwards for a short time Governor
of the Cape; and he made Dundas Street, christened after the
Secretary of State for the Colonies, which then started from the
point on Lake Ontario where the city of Hamilton now stands and,
running west, connected with the river Thames.
[Sidenote: York or Toronto.]
[Sidenote: Simcoe’s views as to the seat of government for Upper
Canada.]
Toronto owed much to him, but not under its present name. The name
Toronto had been borne in old times by Lake Simcoe, and on the
site of the present city of Toronto the French had in 1749[207]
built a fort, named Fort Rouillé. The place had come to be known
as Toronto, but in 1792[208] the new name of York came into vogue,
and in the autumn of the following year, 1793, Simcoe reported
that that name had been officially adopted ‘with due celebrity’,
in honour of the successful storming of the French camp at Famars
near Valenciennes by the force under the command of the Duke of
York on the 23rd of May, 1793. It was not until 1834, when the
city was incorporated, that the old name of Toronto was restored.
Simcoe wrote of Toronto Harbour as ‘the proper naval arsenal of
Lake Ontario’; but it was not here that he would have placed the
seat of government. Strongly convinced of the necessity of opening
communication between Lake Ontario and the upper lakes, without
making the long round by the waters of Lake Erie and the Straits
of Detroit, in 1793 he explored the peninsula between the three
lakes of Ontario, Erie and Huron; and on a river, running westward
into Lake St. Clair, known at that date as the La Tranche river and
afterwards as the Thames[209], a place which was christened London
and where there is now a city with 40,000 inhabitants, seemed to
him to be the most suitable site for the political centre of Upper
Canada. His view was that the seat of government should be inland,
presumably because it would be more central in respect to the three
lakes, and also because it would be further removed from the danger
of raids from the neighbouring territory of the then unfriendly
republic. It is interesting to note that, in a dispatch expressing
an opinion to the above effect, Simcoe added that sooner or later
the Canadas might be divided into three instead of two provinces
and Montreal be made the centre of an intermediate government.
Dorchester held, as against Simcoe, that Toronto should be the seat
of government, and his view prevailed. The Legislature of Upper
Canada met at Newark for the last time in May, 1796, shortly before
the fort of Niagara on the opposite side of the river was handed
over to the Americans,[210] and from 1797 onwards, Simcoe having
left in the meanwhile, it met at Toronto.
[Sidenote: Friction between Dorchester and Simcoe.]
Before Dorchester returned to take up again the duties of
Governor-in-Chief, Simcoe had formed definite views as to the
civil administration and the military defence of Upper Canada;
and it is not surprising that the keen, active-minded soldier and
administrator, who was little more than forty years of age, did
not on all points see eye to eye with the veteran governor now
verging on seventy; or that, when he differed, he was not inclined
to subordinate his opinions to those of Dorchester. Thus we find
Dorchester sending home correspondence with Simcoe with the blunt
remark that the enclosures turned on the question whether he was to
receive orders from Simcoe or Simcoe from him. In his long official
career Dorchester had been much tried. At the time of the War of
Independence, he had been badly treated by his employers in England
and had felt to the full the mischief and inconvenience caused
when those employers divided their confidence and communicated
with one subordinate officer and another, thereby encouraging
disloyalty and intrigue. The correspondence of these later years
points to the conclusion that the iron had entered into his soul
and that, with the weariness of age growing upon him, he had become
somewhat querulous, unduly apprehensive of loss of authority, and
over-sensitive to difference of opinion. There seems to have been
no love lost between him and Dundas, while the latter was Secretary
of State, but all through the last stage of his career the key-note
was dread of divided authority.
[Sidenote: Dorchester’s views in favour of a Central Legislature
and a strong Executive.]
We have seen that he had not favoured the policy of dividing the
province of Quebec into two provinces, and that he had shown
sympathy with Chief Justice Smith’s proposals for establishing a
general government for British North America. In the summer of
1793, after the Canada Act had come into force but while he was
still in England on leave, he raised again this question of a
central government for all the King’s provinces in British North
America, receiving an answer from Dundas to the effect that the
measure would require a new Act of Parliament and that in Dundas’
opinion it would not add to the real strength or happiness of the
different provinces. After his return to Canada Dorchester took up
his text again, laying stress on the necessity of welding together
the different provinces. In existing conditions he saw a revival
of the system which had caused rebellion and the dismemberment
of the Empire. While the United States were pursuing a policy
of consolidation, the aim of the King’s Government seemed to be
to divide and sub-divide and form independent governments. All
power, he continued, was withdrawn from the Governor-General, and
instructions were sent directly from home to inferior officers,
so that the intermediate authority was virtually superseded.
Everything was favourable to insubordination, and the fruits of
it might be expected at an early season. This was in February
1795, when the governor was smarting under what he considered
to be unjust censure by the Home Government; and, though he
remained in Canada for some time longer, he continued to show,
by the tone of his dispatches, that he entirely disapproved of
the existing régime. In November, 1795, he wrote of ‘all command,
civil and military, being disorganized and without remedy’; in
the following May he wrote that ‘this unnatural disorder in our
political constitution, which alienates every servant of the Crown
from whoever administers the King’s Government, leaving only an
alternative still more dangerous, that of offending the mass of
the people, cannot fail to enervate all the powers of the British
Empire on this Continent’; and in June he wrote, that the old
colonial system was being strengthened with ruinous consequences.
[Sidenote: Relations of the Governor-in-Chief and
Lieutenant-Governors.]
It is not easy to decide how much ground there was for his
complaints. If the situation was difficult, the difficulty had
partly arisen from the bad custom, of which he had availed
himself, of allowing governors and other holders of posts in the
colonies to remain for an inordinate time at home while still
retaining office and receiving the pay attaching to it. At the
very time when he was most wanted in Canada to carry out the
division of the two provinces, and to make the central authority
of the Governor-in-Chief strongly felt from the first, he had
remained away for fully two years, thereby allowing the new
system to come into being and to make some progress before there
was any Governor-in-Chief on the spot. Coming out to Canada he
found the Lieutenant-Governors corresponding direct with the Home
Government, and it was hardly reasonable to insist that they
should be debarred from doing so, provided that, as the Duke of
Portland, who succeeded Dundas, pointed out, the Governor-in-Chief
was supplied with copies of the correspondence. An analogous case
is that of Australia at the present day. The governors of the
separate states correspond directly with the Colonial Office,
sending copies of important dispatches to the Governor-General
of the Commonwealth. Had Dorchester not been absent, when Simcoe
took up his appointment in Upper Canada, and had his mind not
been prejudiced by bitter memories of the days of Germain, it is
possible that friction might not have arisen. On the other hand
the limits of the authority of the Governor-in-Chief and of the
Lieutenant-Governors in the British North American provinces seem
not to have been clearly defined, with the result that, as years
went on, the Governor-in-Chief gradually became little more than
Governor of Lower Canada, and the Lieutenant-Governor of Upper
Canada became, in civil matters, governor of that province in all
but the name. When Lord Dalhousie was appointed Governor-in-Chief,
Sir Peregrine Maitland, then Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada,
asked the Secretary of State for a ruling on the subject; and Lord
Bathurst’s answer, dated the 9th of February, 1821, was that ‘So
long as the Governor-in-Chief is not resident within the province
of Upper Canada, and does not take the oaths of office in Upper
Canada, he has no control whatever over any part of the civil
administration, nor are you bound to comply with his directions
or to communicate with him on any act of your civil government.
To His Majesty you are alone responsible for the conduct of the
civil administration’. If, on the other hand, the Governor-in-Chief
were to take up his residence in Upper Canada and be sworn into
office, the Secretary of State laid down that the functions of the
Lieutenant-Governor would be entirely suspended. By this date,
therefore, the two appointments had become exclusive of each other.
At a later date, when Lord Durham was going out to Canada, Lord
Glenelg, then Secretary of State, emphasized still more strongly
the independence of the Lieutenant-Governors. When sending Lord
Durham his commission, he wrote on the 3rd of April, 1838, of
the position which the Governor-General or Governor-in-Chief had
up to that date held in regard to the other provinces. ‘With the
title of Governor-General, he has, in fact, been Governor of
the province of Lower Canada only, and has been prohibited from
resorting to any of the other provinces, lest his presence should
supersede the authority of the respective Lieutenant-Governors,
to whose administration they have been confided.... Hitherto it
has not been the practice to carry on official correspondence
between the Governor-General and any of the Lieutenant-Governors.
The Governor-General and the Lieutenant-Governors have severally
conducted their separate administrations as separate and
independent authorities, addressing all their communications on
public affairs to the head of this department, and receiving from
the Secretary of State alone instructions for their guidance.’
The result of dividing Canada into two provinces was necessarily
to create two governors. One was intended to be subordinate
to the other, but the subordination gradually became nominal
only. The political problems of Lower Canada were so difficult
and so important as to absorb the full time and attention of
the Governor-in-Chief; no railways or telegraphs facilitated
communication; and the British North American provinces, instead of
being controlled by a central executive authority, for good or evil
went their own way.
[Sidenote: Dorchester’s opposition to fees and perquisites.]
It has been seen that during Dorchester’s first government, he
had experienced no little difficulty in dealing with Livius, the
contumacious Chief Justice of Quebec. In the earlier period of his
second government, he had, on the contrary, a wise and loyal fellow
worker in Chief Justice Smith. Soon after the governor returned to
Canada for the last time, towards the end of 1793, Smith died and
his place was taken by Osgoode, the Chief Justice of Upper Canada,
who did not enjoy Dorchester’s confidence to the same extent as his
predecessor. But Osgoode’s appointment was made the occasion for
putting into practice a reform which Dorchester, to his lasting
honour, had urgently pressed upon the notice of the Imperial
Government, the abolition of fees and perquisites, and the payment
of judges and other public officers by adequate salaries alone.
Dorchester himself, when he first took up the government of Canada
in 1766, had refused to take the fees to which he was legally
entitled; and in the last years of his Canadian service he wrote on
this subject in no measured terms. In a dispatch dated the last day
of December, 1793, and written in connexion with the vacant chief
justiceship, he referred to the system of fees and perquisites
as one which ‘alienates every servant of the Crown from whoever
administers the King’s Government. This policy I consider as coeval
with His Majesty’s Governments in North America, and the cause
of their destruction. As its object was not public but private
advantage, so this principle has been pursued with diligence,
extending itself unnoticed, till all authority and influence of
government on this continent was overcome, and the governors
reduced almost to mere corresponding agents, unable to resist the
pecuniary speculations of gentlemen in office, their connexions
and associates’. He added that whatever tended to enfeeble the
Executive power in British North America tended to sever it for
ever from the Crown of Great Britain. Subsequent dispatches were
to the same effect. In June, 1795, he reported having disallowed
certain small claims by subordinate officers, expressed regret that
gentlemen in Britain should look to America for a reward for their
services, and laid down that officers should be paid sufficient
salaries to place them above pecuniary speculations in the
colonies. The next month he wrote in the same strain with reference
to the Customs officials and the collection of revenue: and a year
later he again insisted that such officers should not receive
indirect emoluments, that the local administration should not be
warped and made subservient to fees, profits, perquisites ‘and all
their dirty train’, and that the national interests should not
be sacrificed to gentlemen who possessed or were looking out for
good places for themselves and their connexions. Running through
the dispatches is insistence on the principle that the Executive
must be strong, that it can be strong only if the officers are
duly subordinate to the representative of the Crown, that loyal
subordination can only be produced by paying proper salaries and
abolishing perquisites, and that the loss of the old North American
colonies had been largely due to abuses which had lowered the
dignity and the authority of the Crown, alienating from it the
confidence and the affections of the people.
[Sidenote: Dorchester criticized by Dundas for plain speaking as to
the Americans.]
[Sidenote: War between the Americans and the Indians.]
The censure, if censure it can be called, which Dundas had
passed on Dorchester, and which caused the latter to tender his
resignation, was connected with the attitude which Dorchester felt
it necessary to take up towards the United States after his return
to Canada in the autumn of 1793. The Treaty of 1783 had settled, or
purported to settle, the boundaries of Canada as against the United
States, but it had not settled the boundaries of the United States
as against the Indians, and the Indians manfully maintained their
right to the territory north of the Ohio river. In November, 1791,
an American force under General St. Clair, who had commanded at
Ticonderoga at the time of Burgoyne’s advance, was badly defeated
in the Miami country to the south-west of Lake Erie. The British
Government and the Canadian authorities made various efforts to
mediate between the contending parties, but the government of the
United States was not disposed to accept such mediation, though
British officers were asked to be present at conferences which were
held in the summer of 1793 between representatives of the various
Indian tribes and commissioners of the United States. No result
came from these negotiations, the Indians demanding that the Ohio
should be the boundary, the Americans definitely refusing to comply
with the demand, and in the following year fighting began again.
[Sidenote: American sympathy with France.]
[Sidenote: Genet, French minister to the United States.]
The French Revolution had for some years been gathering strength.
In the autumn of 1792 France had been declared a Republic; and the
execution of the King on the 21st of January, 1793, was followed
on the 1st of February by a declaration of war against Great
Britain. The French also declared war against Spain, the power
which now held New Orleans and Louisiana west of the Mississippi.
The position in North America became at once very critical and
very dangerous. Popular feeling in the United States ran strongly
in favour of France. The Republicans of the New World were
enthusiastic for the people who had enabled them to gain their
independence and who, having put an end to monarchy in France,
were preparing to insist upon the adoption of a Republican system
elsewhere in Europe. Sympathy with France in the United States
implied enmity to England, and Thomas Jefferson, Washington’s
Secretary of State, was pronounced on the side of the French
alliance, representing the views of the Republican party as
opposed to the Federalists, the latter being headed by Alexander
Hamilton and Jay and supported by the unrivalled influence of
Washington himself. On the 22nd of April, 1793, Washington--with
popular feeling strongly against him in the matter--issued a
declaration of neutrality. At the same time, Genet, sent from
France as representative of the new Republic, reached Charleston.
With complete disregard of international law, which, when the
French Revolution was at its height, had largely lost its meaning,
Genet proceeded to make the United States a base for war against
Great Britain and Spain, fitting out privateers, sending agents
to Canada, planning a campaign against Louisiana. For some months
the popularity of his country and his cause, the unpopularity of
Great Britain, and the sympathy which Jefferson the Secretary of
State had with his views, enabled him, in Washington’s words, to
set the acts of the American Government at defiance with impunity
and to threaten the Executive with an appeal to the people; but
gradually Washington’s firmness and the Frenchman’s own outrageous
pretensions had due effect; and, before a year had passed, Genet
was, early in 1794, on the demand of the American Government,
replaced by another minister.
[Sidenote: Danger of war between Great Britain and the United
States.]
[Sidenote: Dorchester’s views.]
It was while the bitterness of feeling against England in the
United States was most intense that Dorchester returned to Canada.
St. Clair had been replaced in command on the Ohio frontier by
General Anthony Wayne, a soldier who had proved his worth in
the War of Independence, a man of strong words and actions, and
war seemed to be imminent. ‘Soon after my return to America,’
Dorchester wrote in the following year, ‘I perceived a very
different spirit’ (from that of the British Government) ‘animate
the United States, much heat and enmity, extraordinary exertions,
some open some covert, to inflame the passions of the people, all
things moving as by French impulse rapidly towards hostilities,
and the King’s Government of Lower Canada in danger of being
overwhelmed, so that I considered a rupture as inevitable.’ Yet,
as he said, he knew well that the British Government were anxious
to maintain friendship and peace with the United States; there
was no private inclination of his own to the contrary; nor, if
there was, had he any force in Canada to back his views. In a
previous dispatch, which was dated the 25th of October, 1793,
almost immediately after his return, after having pointed out the
likelihood of war and the necessity for reinforcements, he had
written, ‘The interests of the King’s American dominions require
peace, and I think the interests of the States require it still
more, though their conduct both to us and the Indians has created
many difficulties.’ He looked, he added, to a great future for the
States and for the white race generally in North America, but not
through war. ‘Not war, but a pure and impartial administration of
justice under a mild, firm and wise government will establish the
most powerful and wealthy people.’
[Sidenote: His firm attitude towards the United States.]
[Sidenote: Protest of the American Government against Dorchester.]
[Sidenote: Dorchester’s resignation.]
Dorchester then was wholly averse to war; but being on the spot
he saw more clearly than ministers in England that, the people of
the United States being minded for war, want of preparation and
appearance of timidity on the British side were likely to bring it
on, that plain speaking and firm action might have a good effect.
Simcoe, who was responsible under him for the frontier of Upper
Canada, seems to have been of the same mind. Accordingly, in
replying to two Indian deputations, one in the autumn of 1793, the
other on the 10th of February, 1794, Dorchester took occasion to
speak out, condemning the aggression of the United States which,
he said, had nearly exhausted the patience of Great Britain, and
referring to war between the two nations as imminent. At the same
time, as a counterblast to Wayne’s advance in the Ohio territories,
and as an outpost in the case of a movement against Detroit, he
ordered a fort to be constructed and garrisoned on what were called
the Miami rapids on the Maumee river, south-west of Lake Erie,
near the site where a fort had been constructed and held during
the War of Independence. Copies, or what purported to be copies,
of the governor’s speeches, and reports of his action, reached the
American Government in due course, and Randolph, who had succeeded
Jefferson, protested, characterizing them as ‘hostility itself’.
In view of this protest Dundas, in July, 1794, by which time Jay,
Washington’s emissary of peace, had arrived in England, addressed
a mild remonstrance to Dorchester, expressing fear that what had
been said and done might rather provoke hostilities than prevent
them; and upon receipt of this dispatch in the following September
Dorchester tendered his resignation. The Duke of Portland, who
succeeded Dundas, was at pains to retain the old governor’s
services, but, though nearly two years intervened before Dorchester
actually left Canada, the correspondence which passed in the
interval showed his anxiety to be gone, now that the danger of war
between Great Britain and the United States had for the moment
passed away.
[Sidenote: Jay’s treaty signed.]
[Sidenote: The border forts transferred to the United States in
1796.]
The most critical time was in the year 1794. In America the forces
which make for war were strongly in evidence. On the other side of
the Atlantic--to the lasting credit of both the British and the
American Governments--representatives of the two countries were
working hard for peace. In the spring of 1794 Washington nominated
John Jay, Chief Justice of the United States, to be a special
envoy to Great Britain with a view to settling, if possible, the
outstanding points of dispute between the two nations. The Senate
confirmed the nomination, and in June Jay reached England and
entered into negotiations with Lord Grenville. The result was that
on the 19th of November following Jay and Grenville signed the
well-known treaty which is associated with the American statesman’s
name, and which provided for an immediate or prospective settlement
of many if not of most of the questions at issue. The treaty
was bitterly attacked in the United States by the Republican
party and those who sympathized with France. Jay, Hamilton, even
Washington himself were denounced and reviled; but the government
had sufficient backing in the country to procure the assent of
the Senate to the terms of the treaty, with the exception of
one article, in the session of 1795; Washington ratified it in
August, 1795; and in the following year the measures for carrying
it into effect were voted by a small majority in the House of
Representatives. Under its provisions, in that same year, 1796, the
border forts were handed over to the United States.
[Sidenote: Wayne defeats the Indians.]
Meanwhile the war between the Americans and Indians ran the normal
course of such wars. The white men suffered some reverses; but,
with a strong body of regular troops supplemented by Kentucky
militia, and with the help of fortified posts constructed along
the line of advance, Wayne by August, 1794, had worn down the
Indians and menaced the British fort on the Maumee river, to whose
commandant, Major Campbell, he addressed threatening letters.
On either side, however, the orders were to abstain from blows,
while Jay and Grenville were negotiating, and the conclusion of
the treaty ensured the abandonment by the British troops of this
outpost of Detroit as well as of Detroit itself. Next year, on the
3rd of August, 1795, Wayne concluded the Treaty of Greenville with
the Western Indians. Under its terms the Americans advanced their
boundary beyond the Ohio, but still left to the Indians on the
south of Lake Erie and in the peninsula of Michigan lands of which
the treaty definitely recognized them to be owners, and where they
were to dwell under the protection of the United States.
[Sidenote: Dorchester and Simcoe leave Canada.]
In September, 1795, the Duke of Portland wrote to Lord
Dorchester telling him that General Prescott would be appointed
Lieutenant-Governor of Lower Canada and would leave for Canada in
the spring, so that Dorchester could suit his own convenience as
to returning to England. At the same time the Secretary of State
repeated his regret that Dorchester had determined to retire.
Prescott arrived on the 18th of June, 1796, and on the 9th of July
Dorchester embarked for England. His ship was wrecked on the shore
of Anticosti island, but he reached England in safety in September,
and died in a good old age in the autumn of 1808. Simcoe, in the
meantime, had, in December, 1795, applied for leave of absence on
account of ill health, suggesting that Peter Russell, the senior
councillor, should in his absence administer the government of
Upper Canada, and tendering his resignation if the leave could not
be granted. His wish was complied with, and, after being detained
for some time at Quebec, he came back with the returning ships
of the autumn convoy and was in London in 1796, two months after
Dorchester’s arrival. Canada saw him no more, and, as has been
told, he died at a comparatively early age, outlived by the old
Governor-in-Chief whose control had fretted his impetuous spirit.
[Sidenote: Lord Dorchester’s services to Great Britain and Canada.]
In the colonial history of Great Britain Lord Dorchester’s place is
or ought to be second to none. Men should be measured by the times
in which they live, the lands in which they serve, the conditions
which they are called upon to face. It did not fall to Carleton’s
lot to be borne on the flowing tide of British victories, to be
a leader in successful wars, to be remembered as one who struck
down England’s foes and added provinces to her empire. Nor was it
given to him to bear rule in times of settled peace, when wisdom
and statesmanship are called on to gather in and store the harvest,
to consolidate, to develop, to reform, to enrich, to give security
and beneficent measures to trusting and expectant multitudes
of the human race. Providence set the span of his active life
while his country’s fortunes were running out on the ebb-tide of
adversity; his public services were coincident with Great Britain’s
depression; and the part of the Empire in which he served was the
scene of her defeats. No men of good English type cheered and
supported him at home, the patriotism which inspired his life was
unknown alike to the ministers who preceded William Pitt and to an
Opposition which, as embodied in Fox, lost all sense of proportion,
and almost all sense of duty, or principle. Yet he held Quebec and
saved Canada. Men turned to him to gather up the fragments after
the War of Independence; and he reconciled French Canada to British
rule and held the balance even between conflicting races and
creeds. Open warfare, political intrigue, in every form and from
every quarter, from without and from within, beset his path. Those
he served and those by whom he was served were in turn disloyal
to him. Colonial questions, such as in times of profound peace
and goodwill, and after generations of experience, are yet almost
insoluble, confronted him, without precedent, without guidance,
in their most uncompromising form. He faced them, and through
all the mire and mud in which England and English civilians and
soldiers and sailors wallowed in these miserable years, he carried
one name at any rate which stood for dignity, uprightness, and
firm prescient statesmanship. It is not to the credit of English
memories or English perception that his name has outside Canada
passed into comparative oblivion. If ever a man had temptation
to despair of or be untrue to his country, and if ever a man’s
character and work redeemed his country and his country’s cause in
unworthy times, that man was Carleton.
A great figure in the colonial history of Great Britain as a whole,
in the history of Canada he is very great indeed. His character is
poles apart from that of old Count Frontenac, and yet he filled
in some sort a similar place. Both were soldier-governors; both
came back to rule a second time; in either case the individual
personality of a firm masterful man was the saving feature of
a time of life and death for the colony. Carleton had none of
Frontenac’s ruthlessness and arrogance, he had not his French
quick wit; but either man in his turn, the one at the end of the
seventeenth century, the other towards the end of the eighteenth,
was in the fullest sense the saviour of Canada.
[Sidenote: General Prescott succeeds Dorchester.]
Dorchester did not actually cease to be Governor-in-Chief of
Canada until the end of April, 1797, some months after his return
to England. He was then succeeded in the office by Prescott, who
in the meantime had been Lieutenant-Governor of Lower Canada
and Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in North America,
having been sworn in at Quebec on the 12th of July, 1796. Robert
Prescott, of Lancashire descent, was an old man when he was sent
to Canada. Born in 1725, he was seventy-one years of age, only
one year younger than Dorchester. He was a Lieutenant-General in
the army and had seen much fighting, principally in North America
and the West Indies. He had served under Amherst and Wolfe, at
Louisbourg and Quebec. He had fought in the War of American
Independence and been present at the battle of Brandywine. In 1794
he was in command of the force which took Martinique from the
French and, as civil governor of the island, he earned the goodwill
of French and natives alike by his tact and humanity.[211] Thus he
had a good record when he was chosen to succeed Lord Dorchester,
and, though his rule in Canada was short and stormy, when he left,
there was abundant evidence of his popularity.
[Sidenote: Intrigues of the French minister in the United States
against Canada.]
Before his arrival in 1796, and at the time, Adet the French
minister in the United States, was making mischief like his
predecessor Genet, intriguing against Washington’s policy of strict
neutrality as between France and Great Britain, and almost openly
inciting the French Canadians to revolt. He over-reached himself,
however, by supporting Jefferson’s candidature for the Presidency
of the United States in succession to Washington, with the result
that he was recalled. Jefferson’s opponent, John Adams, was elected
President; and the feeling between France and the United States
became strained to the verge of war between the two nations. The
French designs on Canada came to nothing. A man named Maclane, said
to have been of weak intellect, was executed for high treason at
Quebec, and a vessel was seized containing arms, ostensibly for the
state of Vermont, but, as the evidence seemed to show, designed for
use in a raid from Vermont on Canada. There was no actual danger,
but there was anxiety and unrest. England was at war with France;
Lower Canada was the child of France; the United States contained
a strong and very bitter anti-English party; and the armed forces
in Canada were almost a negligible quantity. At this same critical
time Prescott became involved in a quarrel with his Executive
Council over the land question.
[Sidenote: The land question in Canada. Prescott quarrels with his
Executive Council.]
A proclamation advertising Crown lands for settlement in Canada,
which was issued in 1792, had called forth a large number of
applications. Surveys had not kept pace with the demand for
allotments, and the result had been that many applicants whose
petitions had been entertained had not actually taken up any land,
while others had settled and occupied land without having any legal
title. As is usual in such cases, land-jobbing was prevalent; and
Prescott, according to his own account, was at pains at once to
frustrate ‘great schemes for accumulating land on principles of
monopoly and speculation’, and to raise the fund which the Imperial
Government had hoped to derive from this source for defraying in
part the cost of civil administration. Prescott’s view, it would
seem, was that those who had actually become occupiers and begun
the work of settlement, should be confirmed in their lands in
full; that, where applications had been recorded but no work done,
the allotments should only be confirmed in part; that purchasers
of claims should be dealt with on their merits, and that, the
outstanding claims having been disposed of, the lands, with the
exception of reserves for the Crown and the clergy, should be
put up for sale at public auction. His Council strongly opposed
him, on the ground that he was giving preference to those who had
occupied land without having been granted any legal title, and that
public sale would bring in a crowd of interlopers from the United
States who would take up the land to the exclusion of Loyalists
who had the first claim on the British Government. Prescott formed
the view, rightly or wrongly, that various members of the Council
were concerned in land-jobbing, and he held that public sale was
the only real preventive of speculation. ‘Industrious farmers,’
he wrote, ‘who would wish to obtain a grant for the purpose of
actual settlement, but who cannot spend their time in tedious
solicitation, stand little chance of obtaining it, compared with
speculators who can devote their time to the attainment of this
object. By disposing of the land at public sale, industrious
farmers would have an equal chance with any other competitor.’
[Sidenote: Benedict Arnold’s claims.]
[Sidenote: Prescott recalled.]
[Sidenote: Milnes and Hunter appointed Lieutenant-Governors of
Lower and Upper Canada respectively.]
The case of Benedict Arnold, though it did not apparently enter
into the controversy, as he was in England at the time, illustrates
the extravagant claims which were put forward to land grants in
Canada. At the beginning of 1797 he wrote to the Duke of Portland,
calling attention to the sacrifices which he had made for the
British Government, and asking for a reward in the shape of a
grant of lands in Canada. A year later he defined his demand. He
stated that the usual grant was 5,000 acres to each field officer
and 1,200 acres for every member of his family; in his own case,
therefore, as his family consisted of a wife, six sons and a
daughter, the total would amount to 14,600 acres; but, as he
had raised and commanded what he called a legion of cavalry and
infantry, he considered that he himself was entitled to 10,000
acres instead of 5,000, making up the total to 19,600 acres. Even
this amount he had amplified in a previous petition to the King,
and he wished to be allowed to select the land where he pleased and
not to be compelled to reside upon it personally.
If Arnold’s claims were at all typical of others, it is not to be
wondered at that Prescott took a strong line on the land question,
with a view to putting a stop to speculation. The controversy
which arose between himself and his Council was embittered by
the course which he adopted of making public their proceedings.
Chief Justice Osgoode and other members of the Council ranged
themselves in opposition to him; and the state of feeling was well
summed up in the words of a correspondent, writing from Quebec in
August, 1798, that the Council must either get a new governor or
the governor a new Council. The Duke of Portland, Secretary of
State, preferred the former alternative. On the 10th of April,
1799, he ordered Prescott home. Robert Shore Milnes was sent out
as Lieutenant-Governor of Lower Canada, and General Hunter as
Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada. They reached Quebec on the
13th of June, and on the 29th of July Prescott sailed for England,
having received before he left addresses of confidence from all
classes, British and French residents combining to pay honour to
him, as a man, who, whatever his faults may have been, had won the
respect and esteem of the people. By the evil custom of those days,
though recalled from Canada, he was allowed to retain for years in
England the office of Governor-General and to receive the pay.
[Sidenote: Close of the eighteenth century.]
Thus the eighteenth century came to an end, that memorable century,
in all parts of the world fruitful alike for good and for evil to
the British Empire, but nowhere so fruitful as in North America.
It had seen New France severed from its motherland. It had seen
the rival British colonies severed from Great Britain. It had seen
the beginnings of an English province in Canada side by side with
the French, and the grant of the first instalment of political
privileges to Canadians of either race. The maritime provinces,
when the century closed, were four in number, Nova Scotia, New
Brunswick, which owed its separate existence to the incoming of the
Loyalists, Cape Breton, which was later to be incorporated with
Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island. The North-West was beginning
to be a factor in Canadian history, and the exclusive power of
the Hudson’s Bay Company in these regions was challenged by the
formation of the North-West Company. Canada was still the land of
the St. Lawrence and the great lakes, but light was breaking into
the limitless area beyond, and as men’s visions widened, there came
more movement and more unrest.
[Sidenote: Milnes’ views as to strengthening the Executive.]
[Sidenote: Independence of the Canadian habitants.]
[Sidenote: Decay of the Canadian aristocracy.]
We have no regular census of the two Canadas between the year 1790,
when there was an imperfect enumeration of the inhabitants of the
then undivided province, and the years 1824-5; but in 1800 the
Lieutenant-Governor estimated the population of Lower Canada at
160,000, while in 1806 an estimate of 250,000 is given from another
source, the population of Upper Canada in the same year being
estimated at 70,000. That at the end of the century Lower Canada
was politically and socially in a state of transition is shown by
an interesting dispatch from Milnes written on the 1st of November,
1800,[212] in which, like his predecessors, he laid stress on the
necessity for taking steps to strengthen the Executive Government.
He pointed out causes which in his opinion united ‘in daily
lessening the power and influence of the Aristocratical Body in
Lower Canada’; and, curiously enough, he considered the first and
most important of these to be the manner in which the province
was originally settled, and the independent tenure by which the
cultivators or habitants held their lands. The feudal system had
been introduced with a view to keeping the colonists in leading
strings, and reproducing in the New World a form of society based
upon the fundamental principle of a landed aristocracy. Yet
this English governor wrote of the habitants at the end of the
eighteenth century, that ‘there cannot be a more independent race
of people, nor do I believe there is in any part of the world a
country in which equality of situation is so nearly established’.
The land had passed into the hands of the peasants from those of
the seigniors, who retained only the old-time privileges of a
trifling rent, taking a fourteenth of the corn which the habitants
were still bound to grind at the seigniors’ mills, and a twelfth of
the purchase-money when lands were transferred. The seigniors, the
dispatch stated, showed no disposition to enter into trade; their
position had in many instances sunk below that of their vassals;
and, taken as a whole, the Canadian gentry had nearly become
extinct.
[Sidenote: Independence of the Roman Catholic Church.]
The second cause to which Milnes attributed the weakness of the
government was ‘the prevalence of the Roman Catholic religion and
the independence of the priesthood’. The Royal Instructions were
that no one should be admitted to Holy Orders or have the Cure of
Souls without first obtaining a licence from the governor; but the
instructions had not been enforced, and the whole patronage of the
Roman Catholic Church had passed into the hands of the bishops,
with the result that the power of the priests over the people was
entirely independent of the government. This evil Milnes proposed
to remedy by increasing the emoluments which the head of the Roman
Catholic Church in Canada received from government funds, on
condition that the rule requiring the governor’s licences for the
parish priests was strictly observed in future.
[Sidenote: Disuse of the militia.]
The third cause which was mentioned as tending to lessen the
influence of the government, was the practical disembodiment of the
militia since Canada had passed under British rule. Under the old
French dominion the government had made itself felt in the various
parishes through the captains of militia and the parish priests,
and the captains of militia had been employed to issue and enforce
the public ordinances. They were, Milnes wrote, chosen from among
the most respectable of the habitants; and though the militia had
not been called out for years past and he did not propose to call
it out, the captains of militia were still in existence and the
government availed itself of their honorary services on public
occasions. He suggested that they should be given some salary or
distinction so that they might consider themselves to be ‘the
immediate officers of the Crown’; and thus he hoped to keep up the
spirit of loyalty among the Canadian people, which ‘for want of an
immediate class to whom they can look up, and from their having
no immediate connexion with the Executive power, is in danger of
becoming extinct’.[213] By attaching to the government the parish
priests and the captains of militia, it might be possible to ensure
a government majority in the House of Assembly and to secure the
election of educated and businesslike representatives, whereas
the main body of the Canadian habitants were, ‘from their want of
education and extreme simplicity, liable to be misled by designing
and artful men’.
[Sidenote: The Crown Lands.]
These proposals the Lieutenant-Governor regarded as temporary
remedies. For the future, he looked to increasing the influence
of the Crown by means of the revenue from waste lands, and the
settlement of those lands by ‘a body of people of the Protestant
religion that will naturally feel themselves more immediately
connected with the English Government’. In the mind of Milnes, as
in that of Dorchester, there was a fixed conviction that matters
were tending to democracy, as democracy had shown itself in the
adjoining republic; that such democracy meant disintegration; that
the influence of the Crown and of the Executive Government was
declining and would continue to decline, unless measures were taken
to counteract the evil. He held to the doctrine that well-wishers
of the government should think it matter for congratulation that
there was an annual deficit on the budget of Lower Canada,[214]
which made the province dependent upon the Imperial Government.
[Sidenote: The close of the eighteenth century was for Canada a
time of transition and division.]
The records of the time show that in every respect the close of
the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century was
for Canada a time of division and a time of change, though not
yet of dangerous bitterness. There were two provinces instead of
one. There were two Lieutenant-Governors, independent of each
other, while the Governor-in-Chief, recalled to England, was
still holding his post and drawing his pay. There were elected
Assemblies, to which the Executive was not responsible, and the
new century opened in Upper Canada with a complaint that the
Lieutenant-Governor had spent money raised from the taxes without
previously obtaining a vote of the Legislature. There was a
suggestion of difficulties arising from the fact that military and
civil authority for the time was divided. An interesting anonymous
letter written from Quebec on the 28th of July, 1806, and signed
‘Mercator’, called attention to this point, alleging that, since
Prescott’s recall in 1799, Lower Canada had languished owing to the
fact that civil and military powers were not in the same hands. The
result, in the writer’s opinion, was jealousy between the civil and
military departments, weakening of the energy of government and
loss of dignity. ‘The Canadians’ he wrote, ‘a military people and
always accustomed to a military government, hold not in sufficient
estimation a person placed at the head of affairs who does not at
the same time command the troops.’[215]
There was again undoubted division between the Judicial and the
Executive power. Chief Justice Osgoode in Lower Canada was not at
one with either Dorchester, Prescott, or Milnes; while in Upper
Canada, in the years 1806-7, a judge of the name of Thorpe became
a member of the elected Assembly and was so outrageous in his
opposition to the government that he was by Lord Castlereagh’s
instructions suspended from his office. The Church of England
bishop found cause to deplore the overshadowing pretensions of
the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic dignitaries, on the
other hand, asked for formal recognition of their position by
the civil government. There was a movement, strongly advocated
by the Church of England bishop, for more and better education,
both primary and secondary, so that the French Canadian children
might learn English, and the children of the upper classes might
be educated without being sent to Europe or to the United States.
The Secretary of State authorized free schools on the express
condition that English should be taught in them, and directed
that part of the Crown Lands revenues should be set aside for the
purpose. There was also a strong feeling that the Jesuit estates,
which long ago had been granted by the King to Lord Amherst but
had never been handed over to him, should be applied to education.
But no general system of state education was established--probably
owing to Roman Catholic feeling; and, as against the proposal to
teach English to the coming generation, there came into being in
1806 a French Canadian newspaper, _Le Canadien_, with the motto,
‘Nos institutions, notre langue et nos lois.’ Nothing in short was
settled in Canada. Once more it was to be shown that pressure from
without was necessary to produce full co-operation within; and,
badly equipped as the two provinces were with means of defence, war
was yet to be to them a blessing in disguise, as bringing them a
step further on the path of national development.
FOOTNOTES:
[189] In the interval the government was administered (i) from
the date of Haldimand’s departure till November 2, 1785, by Henry
Hamilton; (ii) from the latter date till Dorchester’s arrival, by
Colonel Hope. The command of the troops was at first separated from
the acting governorship, and placed in the hands of St. Leger.
Hamilton, who during the war had come into notice as having been in
command of the expedition to the Illinois posts in 1779, when he
was taken prisoner by George Rogers Clark, subsequently proved to
be unfit to act as governor, and was summarily recalled.
[190] The Commission given to Carleton as Governor-in-Chief of Nova
Scotia constituted him also Governor-in-Chief of the islands of St.
John (now Prince Edward Island) and Cape Breton; but, though the
terms of the Commission are not very clear, those two islands were
at the time separate both from Nova Scotia and from each other.
[191] See the _Parliamentary History_, vol. xxvi, pp. 190-5.
[192] See the _Censuses of Canada_ 1665-1871, given in the
fourth volume of the _Census of Canada_, 1870-1, published in
1876. Introduction pp. xxxviii-xliii, and p. 74. On p. 74 is the
following note: ‘The number of settlers of British origin then
in Lower Canada was estimated at 15,000 souls. The United Empire
Loyalists settled in Canada West, not enumerated in this census,
were estimated at 10,000 souls.’ On p. xxxviii, under the year
1784, it is stated:
‘There were at that time (1784) in Upper Canada about 10,000 United
Empire Loyalists, according to a memorandum contained in the
Appendices of the _House of Assembly of Upper Canada_ for 1823.
These 10,000 are not included in the preceding census.
‘1784 British population of Nova Scotia, including Cape Breton and
the mainland, estimated at 32,000 souls, having been increased by
the arrival of about 20,000 United Empire Loyalists (Haliburton,
_Nova Scotia_, vol. ii, p. 275). This estimate of the population of
Nova Scotia, which still included New Brunswick and Cape Breton,
cannot include the Acadians, who then numbered in all about 11,000.’
For the numbers of the United Empire Loyalists, see last chapter.
The figures relating to this time are, in most cases, probably
little more than guesswork.
[193] When the office of Secretary of State for the American
Department was abolished by Burke’s Act of 1782, colonial matters
were placed under the Secretary of State for the Home Department.
This office was in 1787 held by Lord Sydney, who was succeeded by
W. W. Grenville, youngest son of George Grenville, and afterwards
Lord Grenville. When Grenville was raised to the peerage and became
Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, he was succeeded in the
Home and Colonies Department by Dundas, afterwards Lord Melville,
and Dundas was succeeded by the Duke of Portland.
[194] See above, pp. 105-6.
[195] See above, pp. 88 (note) and 193.
[196] For these petitions see Mr. Brymner’s _Introductory Report on
Canadian Archives_, 1890, pp. xxi-ii and pp. 146, 150, 157 of the
Calendar, and see Shortt and Doughty, _Documents Relating to the
Constitutional History of Canada_, pp. 502-5, 524-7.
[197] See Shortt and Doughty, pp. 520-4 and notes; and Debrett’s
_Parliamentary Debates_, vol. xx (1786), pp. 132-49. The statement
that two years had passed since the petition was presented was not
strictly correct, as the petition was dated November 24, 1784.
[198] See Shortt and Doughty, p. 652, note, and Debrett’s
_Parliamentary Debates_, vol. xxiii (1787-8), pp. 684-707.
[199] In 1789, Hugh Finlay, Postmaster-General of the province and
member of council, wrote suggesting that ‘We might make the people
entirely English by introducing the English language. This is to be
done by free schools, and by ordaining that all suits in our courts
shall be carried on in English after a certain number of years’.
See Shortt and Doughty, p. 657. He anticipated to some extent Lord
Durham’s views.
[200] The correspondence is given in full in Mr. Brymner’s _Report
on Canadian Archives_ for 1890, Note B, p. 10. See also Shortt
and Doughty, _Documents Relating to the Constitutional History of
Canada_, 1759-91, and Egerton and Grant, _Canadian Constitutional
Developments_.
[201] Compare the very similar language used by Carleton in a
private memorandum written in 1786 and quoted in note 3, p. 551,
Shortt and Doughty.
[202] No. 46 in ‘Papers relative to the province of Quebec ordered
to be printed April 21, 1791’. The Order in Council is referred
to in Lord Dorchester’s Commission as having been made on August
19, 1791; but that was the date on which the report was made upon
which the Order was based. The boundary line sketched out in the
Parliamentary Paper, and adopted almost word for word in the Order
in Council, was again adopted by Sec. 6 of the British North
America Act of 1867, when the Dominion was formed and the provinces
of Ontario and Quebec, i.e. Upper and Lower Canada, were, after
having been re-united by the Act of 1840, again separated from each
other.
[203] 18 Geo. III, cap. 12: ‘An Act for removing all doubts and
apprehensions concerning taxation by the Parliament of Great
Britain in any of the colonies, provinces, and plantations in North
America and the West Indies, &c.’ The preamble ran as follows:
‘Whereas taxation by the Parliament of Great Britain, for the
purpose of raising a revenue in H.M.’s colonies, provinces and
plantations in North America, has been found by experience to
occasion great uneasiness and disorders among H.M.’s faithful
subjects, who may nevertheless be disposed to acknowledge the
justice of contributing to the common defence of the Empire,
provided such contribution should be raised under the authority of
the general court or general assembly of each respective colony.’
[204] The above statement represents the general effect and
intent of the Act, but a long and complicated controversy arose
subsequently as to the disposal of the taxes raised under the
Imperial Act of 1774 (14 Geo. III, cap. 88), ‘to establish a fund
towards further defraying the charges of the Administration of
Justice and support of the Civil Government within the Province
of Quebec in America.’ It was contended that the effect of the
Declaratory Act of 1778, together with the Constitution Act of
1791, was to hand over the proceeds of these taxes to be disposed
of by the provincial legislatures. The contention had no real
basis, and the Law officers of the Crown reported it to be
unfounded, but eventually, by an Act of 1831 (1 and 2 Will. IV,
cap. 23), the legislatures of the two Canadas were empowered to
appropriate the revenues in question.
[205] _Report on Canadian Archives_, 1891; _State Papers, Upper
Canada_, p. 16.
[206] The monument is in the North Choir aisle. The inscription
runs as follows:
‘Sacred to the memory of John Graves Simcoe, Lieutenant-General in
the army and Colonel of the 22nd regiment of Foot, who died on the
26th day of October, 1806, aged 54, in whose life and character
the virtues of the Hero, the Patriot, and the Christian were so
eminently conspicuous that it may be justly said he served his King
and his country with a zeal exceeded only by his piety towards his
God.
‘During the erection of this monument, his eldest son, Francis
Gwillim Simcoe, lieutenant of the 27th regiment of Foot, born at
Wolford Lodge in this county, June 6, 1791, fell in the breach at
the siege of Badajoz, April 6, 1812, in the 21st year of his age.’
[207] See vol. v, part 1, of the _Historical Geography of the
British Colonies_, p. 196 and note.
[208] Bouchette wrote of York or Toronto in 1815: ‘In the year
1793, the spot on which it stands presented only one solitary
Indian wigwam; in the ensuing spring the ground for the future
metropolis of Upper Canada was fixed upon, and the buildings
commenced under the immediate superintendence of the late General
Simcoe, then Lieutenant-Governor.’ _A Topographical description of
the Province of Lower Canada, with remarks upon Upper Canada, &c._,
by Joseph Bouchette, Surveyor-General of Lower Canada (1st ed.),
London, 1815, pp. 607-8.
According to this account, therefore, the building did not begin
till 1794.
[209] The name of the Thames had been previously for a short time
given to another Canadian river, the Gananoque. See Shortt and
Doughty, p. 651 and note.
[210] Writing in February, 1796, Simcoe stated that the Legislature
would meet at Niagara (Newark) on May 7, but that he proposed to
dissolve the House of Assembly before the fort was evacuated.
[211] Similarly Sir George Prevost was very popular in St. Lucia
when he was commandant and governor in that island, 1798-1802.
[212] This dispatch is printed on pp. 111-21 of _Canadian
Constitutional Development_ (Grant and Egerton).
[213] Cp. the similar views expressed by Carleton at an earlier
date. See pp. 91-4 above.
[214] The average annual revenue of Lower Canada for the five
years 1795-9 inclusive was calculated at £13,000, p. a., of which
only £1,500 was derived from Crown Lands, and the average annual
expenditure at £25,000, leaving an annual deficit of £12,000.
[215] Brymner’s _Report on Canadian Archives_ for 1892, Calendar
and Introduction, p. vi. Cp. Murray’s views as given on p. 67
above, note.